Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and About Mayakovsky

edited by Michael Almereyda (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27)

At the height of his fame, in the nineteen-twenties, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was arguably the leading figure in Soviet art. Perhaps only Walt Whitman—whom Mayakovsky passionately admired—wrote with similar breadth and exhilaration. This volume offers some of Mayakovsky’s best works in vivid translations, and interleaves them with essays, photographs, and historical documents (including a complaint by a Tsarist prison governor about the poet’s refusal to obey commands). In 1930, at the age of thirty-six, Mayakovsky, disillusioned and trapped by the government that he had virtually represented, put a bullet through his heart; for Joseph Brodsky, he was “the first major victim.” His tone of offhand ecstasy helped to produce, decades later, a spectacular new American poetry. It was Mayakovsky who taught Frank O’Hara to talk directly to the sun, and the book includes O’Hara’s beaming account of their conversation. ♦

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